Due to the fact that the basics of cooperation and technical work had been properly set in 1998, the key organizational issues in 1999 were focused as follows:
- permanent communication between the project manager and active working groups in particular countries in order to
- share experience and solve current problems
- distribute working material in printed and in electronic form
- check translated material including it into the common computer database
- checking the results and the progress of individual partner groups, securing steady advancement of activities wherever possible
- preparation of supplementary agreements for groups where additional authors had been drafted
- negotiations with the British Council Köln after they had failed to carry out the promised editing of English, German and Russian
- searching for new collaborators, national coordinators and financial sources for English, German and Russian
- meetings, preliminary talks and sending out promotional and technical material to individuals and institutions for the above mentioned languages
- carrying out formalities due to the change of the national coordinator and financial body for the Polish Language (now Herder-Institut Marburg)
- maintaining contacts with groups where the work had not begun yet due to local financial and/or organizational hindrances (e.g. Lithuania)
- maintaining contacts and negotiating with potentional partners who had expressed their interest but did not join yet (e.g. Croatia, Yugoslavia for Serbian)
- making agreements with individual authors and institutions for recently included teams (e.g. Bosnian and Hungarian)
- negotiating with new potential partners (e.g. Ukrainian, French)
2. Technical progress
Expert working groups in the collaborating countries were busy preparing equivalents in
their respective languages according to the guidelines and the core English language
source material. The resulting materials in 11 languages have been converted thus building
a consistently structured machine readable database ready for further processing. Latin and
cyrillic alphabets appear as parallel scripts at all stages of processing.
The observation of the proposed time scheme depends largely on local circumstances
which is reflected in the results attained. A number of working groups are not able to keep
to the proposed timetable and there are new teams which have joined the project recently
(e.g. for Hungarian and the prospective team for German). The delay mentioned above
will no doubt influence the overall timetable of the entire project and the accomplishment
of the dictionary; however, it will not influence the costs of the execution of the project.
The following materials have been prepared and gathered in electronic form (as of
December 31, 1999):
An additional set of 888 items (coverig the entire alphabet from A to Z) was established, partly
taken from some recent dictionaries and lexicons, partly excerpted from original texts of the
English editions of the ISBD standards. The material was sent to the 6 teams which had
already accomlished the basic A-Z translation.
In September a working meeting took place in Bratislava in order to set the prerequisites for
the printing of a separate English-Slovak volume with a Slovak index included. The dictionary
will be published in January/February 2000.
The Slovenian team in Ljubljana have started activities needed for the publication of an
English-Slovenian dictionary in July 2000.
3. Promotional activities
Promotional activities took place in a number of collaborating countries in order to
demonstrate the work of the local teams and to justify the financial means allocated for the
completion of the local language segments of the dictionary; on the other hand a number of
activities were carried out to present the entire project: 4. Financial issues
According to the particular phase of the project when the major part of costly activities are
distributed and carried out in local teams, thus paid for in their environment, the expenditures
for the central activities and processing were rather low in 1999, covering above all the
following items in administration, data distribution and promotion:
Financial means for the publishing of the printed and the electronic edition have not been
secured yet. This will be a major task in 2000.
5. Concluding recapitulation and evaluation of the results
Following the initial harmonization of technical and formal requirements, 6 national teams
accomplished the translation of the basic A-Z material comprising 4.414 dictionary items; 7
teams have accomplished the translation of the A-R material, 9 teams have prepared the A-L
material and 11 teams the A-C material, 3 additional teams are still dealing with A-D, and there
are 3 further languages with teams potentially attracted (Croatian, Serbian, and Ukrainian).
English and German represent an addition to the cited languages, thus the planned number of
languages has been attained by far.
A particular problem arose when the British Council Köln failed to fulfill their promise to carry
out the English and German part of the project; negotiations with new partners for these
languages are still in progress.
The general progress of the project is slower than planned and has been delayed by the
following circumstances in particular:
The necessary know-how has been acquired and tested through a number of conversions,
processing and outputs in different languages and scripts, resulting in the first printed separate
volume (English-Slovak) planned for January/February 2000, and the second one (English-
Slovenian) in July 2000. Both national teams acquired successfully some extra money from
their ministries for printing which demonstrates well the necessity for the planned dictionary in
their respective professional communities.
The general observation is that the project, involving 46 experts in working teams representing
15 European countries, follows the execution of the planned goals well, with the exception of
the undesired delay in the production of the usables. Thus the preparation of the entire
multilingual dictionary will be shifted into 2000 parallel to the efforts of finding a suitable
publisher and the financial means for the printed and electronic publication of the work.
© Created February 3, 1999
In cooperation with a few selected working teams extensive test processing of the dictionary
material was carried out followed by the printout of the dictionary and the word index in their
particular languages. Selected were some languages where rather specific requirements are
expected as to the character set, diacritics, and alphabet sorting (e.g. Slovak and Estonian),
and cyrillic in general.
Bulgarian
Czech
Estonian
Icelandic
Latvian
Macedonian
Polish
Rumanian
Slovak
Slovenian
(Bosnian, Hungarian and Lithuanian
still in preparation)
Czech
Estonian
Icelandic
Rumanian
Slovak
Slovenian
Czech
Estonian
Icelandic
Macedonian
Polish
Rumanian
Slovak
Slovenian
Czech
Estonian
Rumanian
Slovak
Slovenian
Kaniè, I.: Library Terminology – Two projects, two dictionaries.
Kaniè, I.: Internationale Terminologiearbeit – Multilingual dictionary of
Library Terminology.
Kaniè, I.: Mehrsprachiges Wörterbuch der bibliothekarischen Terminologie –
Ergebnisse der internationalen Zusammenarbeit.
Multilingual dictionary of library terminology [Electronic resource] : international
project / Ivan Kaniè. - 113 files. - Ljubljana, 1999
URL: http://www2.arnes.si/~ljnuk4/multi/multi.html
Honoraria for the editorial and some technical work will be effected when the entire project is
brought to its conclusion.
Consequently it is not sure for certain teams if they are able to produce the expected material
in any reasonable time limits. The possible reasons might be lack of financial and/or human
resources and suitable organization of team work.
The delay in progress is a mere question of time and will not influence neither the quality of the
usables nor the financial issues.
Project Manager
Ljubljana, February 4, 2000
